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President Barack Obama visited the Applied Materials facility in Austin, Texas, on Thursday, touting his administration's program to promote manufacturing in the U.S. "We want the next revolution of manufacturing to be made in America," he told dignitaries and employees at Applied Materials, whose products include production equipment for semiconductors and solar panels.

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The changes ARM Holdings has brought to the microprocessor business are well known, but the IC design firm has also shaken up the embedded microcontroller business as well, writes Alf-Egil Bogen of Energy Micro. "ARM processors are dominant in embedded 32-bit microcontroller designs, and ARM eats its way into 8/16 bits applications with their various cores," he notes.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is budgeting $1.5 billion this year for research and development on fabricating logic and specialty ICs, particularly to meet demand for chips going into mobile devices. TSMC's Tsai Chih-chun said the foundry will add about 300 positions to its R&D staff, increasing it to around 4,200 engineers and scientists. The company's J.K. Wang said TSMC is proceeding with plans to manufacture semiconductors on 18-inch wafers. TSMC reported its April revenue was $1.7 billion, a record for the company.

Emerson Network Power will continue to manufacture and sell processor boards based on the VMEbus standard until 2017, the company says. "VME will remain the primary architecture in many event-driven embedded platforms for many years to come," said Emerson's Hilo Oltman. "This announcement underlines our commitment to providing long-term production and revision management capability that gives customers confidence in selecting these products," Oltman added.

Last year's sales of acceleration and yaw sensors increased by 7%, the smallest growth seen in that market in seven years, according to IC Insights. The market research firm projects that 2013 sales of those parts will grow 12% from last year to $2.84 billion, while 2014 sales will be up 19% more, to $3.39 billion.

Omron's Hisao Sakuta has been appointed as chairman and CEO of Renesas Electronics. The chipmaker reported Thursday that it had an operating loss of $234 million for the fiscal year ended March 31, less than half of the operating loss posted a year earlier.